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Map of vaccine-preventable diseases shows prevalence of measles in the UK

An interactive visualisation mapping outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases around the globe shows a high prevalence of measles cases in the UK that puts it on a par, at least superficially, with regions of India and Africa rather than other areas of the developed world.

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The US Council of Foreign Relations has been collecting the data since 2008 and the visualisation allows curious users to scroll through a timeline to spot outbreaks of the disease around the world over recent years.

Primarily the data relates to measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough and polio, although evidence of several other disease outbreaks are visible too.

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Unsurprisingly, many outbreaks were concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and other areas of the developing world, but you only have to look at the map to see that all regions, including Europe and North America have been blighted by preventable disease outbreaks in recent years.

In Africa, measles and polio were the most common preventable diseases, although there have been outbreaks of rarer diseases such as typhoid in Zambia and Zimbabwe, Ebola in Uganda and the 2012 cholera epidemic in Sierra Leone. Cases of rubella, on the other hand, occurred mostly in Japan and eastern Europe, whereas whooping cough has been most prevalent in the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

As the LA Times points out, the map does suggest that various anti-vaccine movements and scares may well have taken their toll in certain areas of the world, particularly in the UK, where there is an obvious concentration of measles outbreaks.

Council of Foreign Relations/Screenshots

It's not surprising to see an outbreak of measles in the developing world, where vaccines are scarce, but in the UK the MMR vaccine is offered to all children as part of their routine pre-school vaccination schedule. In 1998 a paper published by Andrew Wakefield linked the MMR vaccination to autism in children.

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Subsequent studies and investigations resulted in the report being widely discredited, which led to several coauthors withdrawing their support and Wakefield being struck off as a doctor by the General Medical Council. Unfortunately, Wakefield's report did have an impact in the UK and caused many parents to distrust the MMR vaccine. Paranoia caused inoculation rates in the UK to fall from 92 percent before the publication of the report to 80 percent after its publication.

It's also important to remember, though, that the MMR vaccination was only introduced as standard in the UK in 1988, and even then some children who were vaccinated around this time only received one of the two necessary jabs that are required to ensure immunisation. It's unlikely, therefore, that the prevalence of measles in the UK is purely a result of Wakefield's false report, although it certainly may have contributed to it, and is something we are clearly still seeing the effect of today.